Physics based animation generally facilitates producing realistic video animations wherein objects, particularly soft objects, deform in response to forces. The computation of object deformation, especially for complex objects such as trees, animals, and people, can be time consuming. Therefore, approaches to accelerate such computations are of interest in the field.
Model reduction methods can substantially accelerate deformable simulations and have become popular in many computer graphics applications, ranging from animation generation and control, material design, to realistic sound synthesis. In these methods, a small number of deformation basis vectors or modes are computed beforehand. The online simulation then constrains the deformation to a subspace spanned by the modes, tremendously reducing the simulation degrees of freedom. While enjoying fast simulation performance, model reduction methods need to carefully construct a set of modes that well express possible deformations during the simulation. This is usually an expensive task that can take hours to obtain plausible modes.
The conventional wisdom here is to tax the preprocessing step in exchange for runtime performance. Indeed, if the object geometry and material properties have been decided, it is worthwhile and affordable to precompute once for repeated online simulations. However, when the shape or material is frequently altered—for instance, in the case where a user is exploring different animation settings, a long precomputation time would drastically slow down the work flow because every geometric and material update dictates a re-computation of the reduced model. There is a need in the art to accelerate precomputation in a typical reduced deformable simulation pipeline, a problem that has been largely overlooked.